Cambridge. Now he was afraid of a Ronan who couldn’t.
There were, Declan thought, so many damn things to be afraid of.
“My car didn’t do anything to you,” Declan said blandly, easing his own door shut. “Matthew, the bag.”
Matthew retrieved the take-out bag of burritos. He was in a great mood. He was always in fine spirits, of course—that was what it meant to be Matthew—but he was in even better spirits when allowed to come to Great Falls. He would come every day if he could, a fact Declan had found out earlier that summer. He took his role as substitute parent seriously. He read articles on discipline, motivation, support. He established curfews, enforced consequences, and served as adviser rather than friend. His promotion to legal guardian meant he could no longer be just a brother. He had to be Law. It meant he’d been quite strict with Ronan after their parents died. With Matthew, however—well, Matthew was so happy that Declan found he would do anything to keep him that way. That summer, however, he’d requested to come day after day until eventually Declan, for the first time, had to turn him down.
Declan thought he still felt worse about that conversation than Matthew did.
“Give me my burrito,” Ronan said. “I’m so hungry I could eat it twice.”
It was clear to Declan that Ronan wasn’t remotely in the mood to joke, but he, too, would do anything to make Matthew happy.
And it worked. Matthew burst into his easy, infectious laugh as he slapped on an ugly hat. He had ghastly fashion sense. The kid was the entire reason why school uniforms had been invented.
“My hiking hat,” he said, as if the manicured, flat trail could possibly be construed as anything more severe than a stroll.
They walked. They ate—well, Ronan and Matthew did. Ronan, in big wolfing bites. Matthew, with the barely checked delight of a child at Christmas. Declan left his untouched because he hadn’t brought an antacid and his stomach was a ruin as usual. The only sounds were their footfalls and the continuous rush of the falls. Damp yellow leaves sometimes fell here or there, deeper in the trees. Puddles on the walk sometimes trembled as if rain had fallen in them, though there was no sign of rain. It felt wild. Hidden.
Declan cautiously stepped onto the topic at hand. “Your teachers say you’ve been sitting on the roof.”
“Yup,” Matthew said cheerfully.
“Ronan, Mary mother of God, chew some of that before you choke.” To Matthew, Declan persisted, “They said you were looking at the river.”
“Yup,” Matthew said.
Ronan tuned in. “You can’t see the river from the school, Matthew.”
Matthew laughed at this, as if Ronan had cracked a joke. “Yup.”
Declan couldn’t probe the motivations of Matthew’s mysterious pull toward the river too hard, because that might tip Matthew off to his dreamt origin. Why did Declan withhold this bit of truth? Because Matthew had been raised as human by their parents and it felt cruel to take it from him now. Because Declan could only handle one brother in crisis. Because he was so thoroughly trained in secrets that everything was one until proven otherwise or stolen from him.
“They said you keep leaving class,” Declan said. “Without explanation.”
Matthew’s teachers had said that and a lot more. They’d explained that they loved Matthew (an unnecessary statement; how could they not?), but they worried he was losing his way. Papers were turned in late, art assignments forgotten. He lost focus during class discussion. He asked to use the restroom in the middle of the period and then never returned. He had been discovered in the unused stairwells, empty rooms, on the roof.
On the roof? Declan had echoed, tasting bile. He felt he’d lived one thousand years, every one of them hell.
Oh, not like that, the teachers had hurried to explain. Just sitting. Just looking. At the river, he said.
“Whatdya gonna do?” Matthew said, with an amiable shrug, as if his behavior were something puzzling even to him. And probably it was. It was not that he was stupid. It was more that he had a deliberate absence of intellectual skepticism. Byproduct of being a dream? Deliberately dreamt into him?
Declan hated that he loved someone who wasn’t real.
Mostly he hated Niall. If he’d bothered teaching Ronan a damn thing about the dreaming, life would look very different right now.
Matthew seemed to have clued in to the idea, at the very least, that he was troubling his brothers, because he asked, “Whatdya want